At first the audience thought this was a good stunt. Some of them started to applaud, but the applause petered out as the manager stood up again.

“He’s dead,” he said in a stunned voice. “Somebody go for the police.”

There was a shriek from the stage box. “Where’s my husband? What’s happened to him?”

“Yes, where is he?” other voices echoed. “Where’s Houdini then?”

“Find Houdini. Don’t let him leave the theater!” the manager shouted. “Lock all the exits. Bring up the houselights.”

There was an eerie silence as the lights came on in the auditorium and then chaos broke out. I had been standing by the body so I hadn’t noticed that Daniel had come onto the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please.” He held up his hands for silence. “Take your seats. Nobody move. I’m Captain Sullivan of the New York police, and this is now a police matter. Nobody is going anywhere until my men arrive. I ask for your complete cooperation. Ushers, would you please man the doors.” He turned to the manager. “Is there a telephone available?”

“In my office.”

“Then go and call police headquarters and tell them that Captain Sullivan wants the detective on duty here immediately with a team of men. Tell them there has been a murder.”

“Are you sure it’s murder?” the theater manager asked. “Not just a stunt gone wrong?”

Daniel gave me a brief glance as he knelt to examine the body. “Help me get him out of this thing,” he ordered the men standing around him. “Gently.” Willing hands pulled away the bag from the body. It was a young man wearing a brown suit—a very ordinary, respectable-looking young man with light brown hair and the beginnings of a mustache. Daniel opened the jacket. There was an ugly red stain across the front of the shirt.

“Hardly a stunt gone wrong,” Daniel said dryly, undoing the shirt buttons. “Stabbed through the heart. Very efficient. Very professional.” He examined the body more thoroughly. “And it doesn’t look as if he’s been dead very long. Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet.” He looked up at those around him. “Anybody know who he is?”

Blank faces stared at him.

“Never seen him before in my life,” one of the stagehands muttered.

“So he doesn’t work here at the theater?”

The men shook their heads.

Daniel now looked up at me. “You were apparently part of this act. So none of this was prearranged?”

“A murder? Prearranged?”

“I meant that it might have been part of the act for Houdini to change places with someone.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Usually his wife performs the Metamorphosis act with him, in which they do change places. But tonight’s trick was a simple escape. Houdini was just supposed to free himself from the ropes and emerge from the trunk. Yesterday it took him less than a minute to do so.”